'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

have only reached 1980, but it's definitely a page-turner. the fictional bits verge on the ridiculous, but the writing and the portrait of reagan's personality are exemplary. there's a passage comparing reagan's personality to a glacier that's probably as good a piece of writing as i've ever read in any biography.

now the fun begins! Wait till you get to the descriptions of a typical day, William Clark, David Stockman, and Bitburg.

Ornamental Cabbage, thanks so much for encouraging me to read this collection of short novels by Colette!

Yay, dow! Glad you like her. She wrote a LOT of books, and they're all pleasingly short (I don't think any of them break 200 pages). If you can find some of her short stories, especially the ones based on her time as an actor in Paris, they're also great.

After finishing MaddAddam (anybody else read it? I need to have a post-op discussion) I'm moving onto Murakami – Colorless. Then, I'm gonna give another go to something traditional I've disliked. Something inspired by the 'authors you hate poll.' I might try Moveable Feast again.

xpost I'll check those out too, OC. And somebody just sent me Colette's advice columm--it's from a new collection of her previously untranslated stuff
http://logger.believermag.com/post/102890463209/colettes-advice-column

http://media.tumblr.com/d95cf76eabb70fe75ed91739ec386371/tumblr_inline_neh036ly0T1rglck1.png

Rick Perlstein The Invisible Bridge

magisterial imo, only quibble is my desire for more on the rise of religious right but perhaps that will surface in the Carter/Reagan era follow-up. perhaps Perlstein is better at summary than synthesis but this is still a treasure trove for anyone interested in the transitional mid-70s. reading was an intensely *personal* experience because it triggered so many formative memories of politics and culture when i was a teenager, now clarified by middle-age perspective.

John Le Carre A Perfect Spy

maybe not the epic/grand finale he intended but a fitting end to the cold war spy saga and probably the last book of his I need to read.

Haruki Murukami Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

My first Murukami and probably not the place to start. 75% fascinating and then my interest flagged, felt like a YA novel w/youthful perspective on adult life.

Dennis Lehane The Drop

short story stretched to novella length for movie tie-in and wouldn't you know, it's the inconsistent Lehane's best work since Mystic River and his scripts for The Wire

Ian McEwan The Children Act

don't know if this novella is a short story stretched but it feels slight somehow and I actually liked Saturday and Solar. Those novels captured arrogant a-holeish main characters but the judge here is just dull despite the thorny dilemma she's faced w/. first time I've thought McEwan was going thru motions.

James Hamilton-Patterson Rancid Pansies

funnier and less self-consciously "well written" than Cooking With Fernet Branca at least on my literary laugh meter.

Tim O’Brien The Things They Carried

Vietnam War live and in after-the-fact flashback and just as horrific/moving as you'd expect. why don't we (amerikans) learn from the past?

Jo Nesbo The Redcoat

author maybe bites off more than he can chew by tying WW2 era Norwegian Nazis into contemporary crime wave but fairly interesting nevertheless. Not sure how much Nesbo's book-to-book variation in quality (he's all over the place in the half-dozen I've read) is due to translation.

Martin Amis The Zone Of Interest

He's such a lightening rod in these quarters I'll just say this is arguably his best novel and surely best since Money and be done w/it. #copout

James Elroy Perfidia
Marlon James A Brief History of Seven Killings

two long crime novels using historical events as departure points for sweeping epic tales and social commentary. Elroy is imitating himself at this point, veering toward self-parody at times. James otoh stakes his claim as a fresh voice of the Jamaican diaspora and a riveting storyteller. Best new author I've read this year.

currently wading through Richard Norton Smith's On His Own Terms: A Life Of Nelson Rockefeller and looking forward to the new Michael Connelly and William Gibson's The Peripheral plus George Clinton's memoir. The librarian gave me a funny look when I checked out Rocky and Dr. Funkenstein at the same time.

He's such a lightening rod in these quarters I'll just say this is arguably his best novel and surely best since Money and be done w/it. #copout

I bought this after thinking I'd given up on Amis after Yellow Dog--haven't yet started it, but more because not feeling strong enough for genocide rather than Amis leariness

Ghost stories week for my Victorian lit class:

Elizabeth Gaskell, "The Old Nurse's Story" (essential)
R.L. Stevenson, "The Body Snatcher" (probably essential, but unfairly tainted by my love the Val Lewton film adaptation)
Charles Dickens, "To Be Taken With a Grain of Salt" (a trifle)
Margaret Oliphant, "Old Lady Mary" (curious...)
William Harrison Ainsworth, "The Spectre Bride" (harsh!)
George MacDonald, "Uncle Cornelius, His Story" (awful)

Got confused for a second and thought this last was by the author of the Flashman series.

that Gaskell story is part of this: "Curious, if True" - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24879

On an ILB recommendation, I started Richard Brautigan's 'Hawkline Monster'. Interestingly and frugally written, I can imagine finishing this very quickly.

Ian McEwan The Children Act

don't know if this novella is a short story stretched but it feels slight somehow and I actually liked Saturday and Solar. Those novels captured arrogant a-holeish main characters but the judge here is just dull despite the thorny dilemma she's faced w/. first time I've thought McEwan was going thru motions.

I'm trying to figure out how to write about it. For a while its slightness felt like a relief.

yeah I didn't nail it in that post, something fuzzy about the judge makes her hard to process. didn't know what to think about her failing marriage. guess the husband's somewhat legalistic declaration about having an affair was meant to be uh ironic.

Alfred you might be interested in the Rockefeller bio. Kind of a companion piece to The Invisible Bridge, less riveting/well-written but the good bits are copious. I didn't know that Kissinger began as advisor to Nelson in the 50s, some of Henry's sycophantic arias could have been lifted verbatim from Nixonland.

speaking of Invisible Bridge, I also didn't remember, or know, just what a diehard Tricky Dick defender Reagan was right up until the bitter end of Watergate. Was he cynical, delusional, oblivious or all three? The latter is my choice.

I read the Rockefeller: https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/if-you-dont-like-the-effect-dont-produce-the-cause-nelson-rockefeller/

Just finished reading Robert B. Ray's "A Certian Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930-1980". One of the best books on Hollywood ideology I've ever read.

Geertz's "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight"... so good.

Was he cynical, delusional, oblivious or all three? The latter is my choice.

Also, stupid.

Well there's that too

hey evr i just read the luiselli book too. she's really neat. i am gonna try the novel.

Last couple of weeks reading - all of which I loved apart from Meadowland perhaps, which was a bit of a chore:

F Tennyson Jesse - A Pin To See The Peepshow
Anonymous - A Woman in Berlin
Ivan Turgenev - On The Eve
Ian MacDonald - Revolution in the Head (why did it take me two decades to get around to reading this?)
Derek Marlowe - A Single Summer With L.B. (loveable Byron and his doctor in Switzerland)
Ivan Turgenev - Spring Torrents
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - The Leopard (started this a few years ago and gave up. This time I devoured it.)
John Lewis-Stempel - Meadowland
William Shakespeare - Macbeth

finished THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD
I was impressed

now reading a book about the author and annoyingly it makes her out to be less likeable than the novel did
maybe best to 'trust the tale'?

finished morris's 'dutch' a couple nights ago. it won me over completely once it got to reagan's presidency; i think it's one of the best biographies i've read in years. he managed to humanize reagan and make sense of his personality in a way that rang true for me. the eyewitness account of the first meeting with gorbachev was a highlight. thinking of going back and plowing through all of morris's roosevelt books now (read the first one about 10 years ago but never got around to the others).

YES

My favorite bits: Reagan presenting Morris with his laboriously written legal pad paper history of Ickes' purported Fascist education; Morris' evocation of the Slough of Despond into which RR sank after Iran-Contra (which coincides with the official history: Howard Baker momentarily thought he'd have to invoke the 25th Amendment); and, yeah, Helsinki.

im reading tender is the night & bech at bay and night-side, which are JCO short stories

getting v into Arno Schmidt. Finishing volume 2 of the Dalkey Archive collection – Scenes from the Life of a Faun, Brand's Heath and Dark Mirrors – and starting on volume 1, the novellas. Thick prose, landscapes and learning, germanic-romantic-fabular patchworks, some misanthropy, nazis, jokes, apocalypse, misanthropy, surviving. I love him.

Just started A Wizard of Earthsea since it was lying around the bed. Bought it in omnibus form last month & now its author turns out to be topical.
I just found it browsing a charity shop.

i just read that! it's strangely haunting.

now reading Oakley Hall's Warlock. was inspired by it to watch Tombstone for the first time in 15 years and that movie hasn't held up well at all.

Warlock seems to be considered his best---haven't read it, but The Bad Lands feat. character development via action x sufficiently shaded/shady historical settings.

FAO Fizzles I am still reading THE GIFT OF STONES
it is getting more compelling!
as I mentioned, it is only a short book so I will actually finish it some time.

I am still plugging along slowly with Screech's Rabelais. I am thankful it is the sort of book that does not suffer much from being read in small increments.

Dracula. Another one I'm only now reading for the first time.

Kafka, The Castle

I am still plugging along slowly with Screech's Rabelais. I am thankful it is the sort of book that does not suffer much from being read in small increments

otm, I've got it ticking along on Kindle and read a few pages between other things – in fact I'm in this dipping mess on Kindle where I've got Screech's Rabelais and Montaigne (both were surprisingly cheap for Kindle on uk amazon), but I'm also looking at the same chunks in Urquhart's Rabelais and Florio's Montaigne.

(I think Screech's Rabelais is a lot better than his Montaigne, which was the first version I read, years ago – his love of arcane and archaic vocabulary & learning suits it better imo. I find him a bit wooden when he isn't dictionary-digging)

ion a train, but I think screech's Rabelais is excellent with Urquhart good in a diff way obv. Seem to recall either the introduction, notes or some sort of other sch apparatus by screech is also v good and a necessary counterweight to a critical over reliance on bakhtin in this area.

cockend next to me on the train is trading Legacy - 15 Lessons in Leadership. What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life.

wd love to read sthn good on the models that business devours. sportsthink is surely becoming yesterday's mode - feel that model was in itself inherited by sport from the army. boot camps and paintball. all that fuckin shit.

reading not trading tho

what's replacing jonny_wilkinson_kick_world_cup.jpg in the nu-management ppt deck? Breaking Bad?

maybe time for a 'faster you fuckers' revive.